She reached and foolishly touched one, triggering a stinging snap. A painful jolt shot up her arm, but instead of being thrown back, she felt her arm pulled forward. Her palm struck the golden surface. With contact, the bones of her fingers suddenly ignited, burning through her flesh. Shock and horror clamped her throat shut. Her knees weakened.
She heard Hank shout at her.
Ryan bellowed, too.
One word cut through the agony.
Bomb!
The brilliant flash blinded Hank. One moment he was shouting at Maggie, the next his vision went white. A clap of thunder tried to crush his skull, immediately deafening him. An icy shock wave knocked him back like a cold slap from God. He hit the ground on his back, then he felt a strange tug on his body, pulling him toward the explosion.
He fought against it, panicked down to the core. The sensation felt not only wrong, but fundamentally unnatural. He struggled against that tide with every fiber of his being.
Then it was over, as quickly as it had begun.
The inexorable pull popped away, releasing him. His senses snapped back. His ears filled with wails and screams. Images swirled into focus. He lay on his side, facing toward where Maggie had stood. He didn’t move, too stunned.
She was gone — so were the crate, the skull, and most of the cliff, including the cave entrance.
He raised up to an elbow and searched.
There was no sign of her, no charred remains, no mangled body. Nothing but a blackened circle of steaming rock.
He struggled up. Kawtch shimmied closer on his belly, cowering, tail between his leg. If Hank had a tail, he’d have done the same. He placed a reassuring palm on the dog’s side.
“It’ll be okay.”
He hoped it was true.
By now, the crowd had regained its collective footing. A panicked exodus began. The news crew retreated to higher ground, shuffled back by a cordon of National Guard. Two soldiers manhandled the governor up the trail, a precaution in case there was another attack.
Harry pictured the bag tossed by the girl. When it had landed by the crate, it had flapped open and its contents spilled out: cubes of yellowish-gray clay, embedded with wires.
Major Ryan had immediately recognized the threat.
Bomb.
But the warning had come too late for Maggie.
A knot of anger burned in the pit of his belly. He let it settle there as he pictured the attacker. From the girl’s burnished copper skin, brown eyes, and black hair, she was definitely Native American. A homegrown terrorist. As if matters here weren’t bad enough.
Numb with grief, he stumbled toward the blast zone, needing to understand. To the side, Major Ryan picked up his helmet and placed it back on his head.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Ryan said, still dazed. “The force of this explosion should have taken out half the crowd. Including us.” He held up an open palm. “And just feel that heat.”
Hank did. It felt like a blast furnace. The air reeked of burning brimstone, turning his stomach.
As they watched, a large boulder crumbled apart within the blast zone, breaking down into smaller rocks. The face of the cliff began to do the same, disintegrating into a flow of boulders and sand. It was as if the hard granite had become loose sandstone, friable and weak.
“Look at the ground,” Ryan said.
Hank stared at the blasted rock, steaming and awash with a swirl of mist. The drizzling rain hissed and spattered as it struck. Still, he didn’t see what had Major Ryan so agitated. Then again, the man had much younger eyes.
Hank dropped to a knee to inspect the ground more closely. Then he saw it, too. He’d missed it through the swirl of steam. The stone surface wasn’t solid, more like ground pepper — and it was moving!
The grains jittered and trembled as if they were drops of oil simmering atop a hot skillet. He watched a small pebble on the surface dissolve into coarse sand, then into a dusty powder. A drop of rain struck the ground and blasted a crater. Like a pebble hitting a still pond, ripples spread outward across the microfine surface
Hank shook his head in disbelief. Fearful, he studied where the blast zone ended and solid ground began. As he stared, the bordering edge of stone crumbled to sand, incrementally expanding the blast zone.
“It’s spreading,” Hank realized, and pushed Ryan back.
“What are you talking about?”
Hank had no answers, only a growing certainty. “Something is still active. It’s eating away the rock and radiating outward.”
“Are you nuts? Nothing can—”
From the center of the blast zone, a belch of water burst upward from below and coughed into a steaming column, rising several yards into the air. A scalding heat chased them farther off.
By the time they stopped, Hank’s skin burned, and his eyes felt parboiled. He gasped and choked out a few words.
“Must’ve cracked into the geothermal spring… under the valley.”
“What are you talking about?” Ryan pulled his jacket collar over his mouth and nose. The burning sulfur made even breathing dangerous.
“Whatever’s happening here, it’s not only spreading outward—”
Hank pointed to the minigeyser.
“—it’s also heading down.”
Chapter 3
So much for dinner plans.
Though the explosion in Utah was only an hour old, Painter Crowe knew he’d be in his office all night. Details continued to flow in by the minute, but information remained sketchy due to the remote mountainous location of the blast. All of Washington’s intelligence communities were on high alert and mobilizing to bear on the situation.
Including Sigma.
Painter’s group operated as a covert wing for DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. His team was composed of handpicked Special Forces soldiers — those whose IQs tested off the scales or who showed unique mental acumen. He recruited and retrained them in various scientific disciplines to act as field operatives for the Defense Department’s research-and-development wing. Teams were sent out into the world to protect against global threats.
Normally, such a domestic attack as in Utah would not fall within his team’s purview, but a few anomalous details had drawn the interest of his boss, the head of DARPA, General Gregory Metcalf. Painter might have still argued against utilizing Sigma’s resources for such a messy business, but as a result of the controversy surrounding the blast, even the president — who owed his life to Sigma in the past — had personally requested their assistance in this delicate matter.
And one does not say no to President James T. Gant.
So Painter’s barbecue plans with his girlfriend were put on hold for the night.
Instead, he stood with his back to his desk and studied the large flat-panel monitors mounted on the three walls of his office. They depicted various views of the blast. The best footage came from the CNN cameras that had recorded the event. The other monitors flowed with grainy video and photos captured from cell phones, the millennium’s new digital eyes on the world.
For the hundredth time, he watched the looping feed from CNN. He saw an older woman — Dr. Margaret Grantham, an anthropologist — leaning over a green military transport crate. She undid the latches and lifted the lid. A commotion ensued, jittering the camera feed. The view swung wildly. He caught a glimpse of a figure behind the woman, fleeing away — then a blinding flash of light.